Undergraduate enrollment in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences has more than doubled in the past 10 years. To keep up with this rapidly growing student body, the school continues to add to its ranks of highly qualified professors.

Since 2010, BBS has attracted 14 new tenured and tenure-track faculty members, increasing the number of full-time instructors by more than 24 percent.

“BBS possesses a very broad mission, but our strategic initiatives in faculty hiring focus on establishing domains of national prominence,” said Dr. Bert Moore, dean of the school and Aage and Margareta Møller Distinguished Professor. “We continue to hire new faculty who both extend and reinforce those domains, and who will also be productive in an environment which emphasizes interdisciplinary, collaborative work.”

Dr. Julia Evans and Dr. Sven Vanneste both embody this interdisciplinary mission, tying neuroscience with audiology and speech pathology. Their research crosses programmatic boundaries and also offers new insights to students.

“We always seek candidates who have a strong commitment to teaching and mentoring students,” Moore said. “The school currently has the second-highest ratio of student majors to faculty on the campus; so there are many areas where we need to add faculty. Current priorities include audiology, neurotechnology, cognitive, language and social development, and the brain bases of behavior.”

“Without the ability to communicate, an individual cannot exist. Language, arguably one of the most complex skills acquired by humans, emerges rapidly and effortlessly for most children. But for children with specific language impairment (SLI), this process is significantly impaired. My research aims to understand how and why language acquisition and use is impaired in children with SLI, how and why brain structure and function differs in these children, and how these differences map onto more effective models of intervention.”

“My research focuses on understanding the common pathophysiological mechanisms clustering groups of pathologies, such as thalamocortical dysrhythmias (pain, tinnitus, depression) or obsessive compulsive spectrum disorder (addiction, OCD, eating disorders) by translating knowledge obtained from one disease to other diseases with similar underlying mechanisms, and to develop novel invasive and non-invasive neuromodulation treatments based on it.”